Musica Stampata – Issue 3 (June 2021) Writing about imaginary music (is really like dancing about architecture) Autobiography, mini-theory, and mini-anthology of uphonic criticism by Gabriele Marino1 Abstract Ever since its existence, music criticism has been cyclically accused of inadequacy (how can words capture the proverbial ineffability of sounds?), arbitrariness (what is the value of a judgment that seems so often indefensibly subjective?), uselessness (after all, what are the words of music critics if not false and parasitic?). If music criticism seems far-fetched and sterile, how should we judge the critical gesture exercised on music that does not even exist? It may seem strange, but in the course of music writing, some – critics, journalists, writers of “stuff about music” – have dedicated themselves to this paradoxical activity, with very different aims and styles. It is possible to write about records that do not exist, but about musicians that are quite real. Or to fantasise about music played and recorded by completely imaginary musicians. One may want to make fun of the music system (discography, stardom, fandom, the music press itself) or one may, instead, want to engage in a complicit game with whomever will read the – perhaps very plausible – review of that non- existent record. Writing about imaginary records is certainly a curious fact — Which allows us to illuminate, in a particularly effective way, the practice of writing about music in general. “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” – Daniel Defoe in the exergue of Albert Camus’ The Plague “Fake money is no more fake than real money.” – Dargen D’Amico “It suffices that a record be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded.” – DJ Luis Borges, The Discoteque of Babel 1 Gabriele Marino is a semiotician who works at the University of Turin, Italy, within the FACETS research project. He has worked mainly on music, memes, martyrs, and masks. He single-authored two books in Italian, one on the reviews of records that do not exist (Britney canta Manson e altri capolavori, ‘Britney sings Manson and other masterpieces’, Falconara Marittima: Crac, 2011) and one on the semiotics of musical genres (Frammenti di un disco incantato, ‘A Broken Record’s Discourse: Fragments’, Torino: Aracne, 2020). NOTE TO THE TEXT: This article represents a freeze-dried and, at the same time, expanded (in the sense of “updated”) version of the first of the two books mentioned above, the one on imaginary records. I have limited the bibliographical references to the bare minimum. Some URLs have been shortened via Bitly. I would like to thank Fiamma Mozzetta for her patience and for giving me the opportunity to finally return to this topic and present new archival material (for some of which I thank Gian Maria Rizzardi and Giulio Pasquali). 2 I fell for it. And I liked it The December 2005 issue of Blow Up (a monthly Italian music magazine) featured on its cover the band Zu, a jazzcore trio from Ostia – “more famous abroad than in Italy” – which two years earlier had impressed me at the Ypsigrock festival in Castelbuono (Palermo, Sicily). A biblical downpour had postponed the live show for hours, and the concert had begun with a 180 bpm version of “Beat on the Brat” by the Ramones, during which Jacopo Battaglia, the drummer, had taken off one of his shoes and thrown it in the face of my neighbour in the audience. When the concert was over, I went to congratulate the band and try and chat with them: we started talking about Mundo Civilizado by Arto Lindsay. In those years I was compulsively – and one might add bulimically – approaching music criticism; something that, being a comicbook fan, I had discovered on Linus through Riccardo Bertoncelli’s music column. I used to buy Il Mucchio Selvaggio, a weekly Italian magazine at that time, regularly, and the other magazines (Rumore, Rockerilla, Buscadero, Blow Up) just occasionally (when there was something interesting on the cover; or when I had the money to buy them). I had certainly bought an issue of Blow Up back in 2003, the one that came with the book Rock e altre contaminazioni (‘Rock and other contaminations’): one of those guides that drove me crazy because the reviews were about strange artists and were well-written; for instance, the visionary article on the Stooges’ Fun House, written by a certain Christian Zingales. In addition to the article on Zu, written by Massimiliano Busti, that 2005 Blow Up issue contained the usual musical fruit salad (“Rock and other contaminations”, indeed): Kate Bush, Pharrell Williams, Darby Crash, Billie Holiday, Fausto Romitelli, Riccardo Cocciante. The very last page of the issue was dedicated to the new album by Vinicio Capossela, another musician who had struck me (with his epiphany at Daniele Luttazzi’s TV show “Satyricon”, where he presented Canzoni a manovella, ‘Hand-cranked Songs’, in 2001). The record had been recorded by Capossela with Elio Martusciello (who was known to me not only as a refined sound artist, but also as a refined essayist).2 The review of this record was written by someone with what I thought was a beautiful name: Dionisio Capuano. And it was beautiful to imagine: a Capossela album together with Martusciello. The review confirmed this hypothesis: it was a “sacred and desperate work. To the point that sounds were stripping bare”. It was a “concept-album with an expressionist-Kurtweillian structure, which mixes at least three stories. Peter and the Wolf [, ...] the Magic Flute [, and] the tale of a storyteller similar to a fusion between Mad Max and Zampanò.” In short: this strange, but not so strange, combination of Capossela and Martusciello does work. “We figured that Elio Martusciello would get along well with ‘blood and sweat’ musicians. His collaboration with Mike Cooper (who comes from the blues and loves the ukulele) was just a hint. For his part, Capossela has his own oddities: improvisational upsurges, this idea of sinking into sonic mud, into the ‘waste disposal’ of genres, these emissions of folk-cabaret biogas whose stench may have attracted an anomalous electroacoustic type of guy like Elio. In Capossela’s pentagrams 2 Elio Martusciello, “Lumpy Gravy è un dispositivo di superficie,” in Frank Zappa domani: sussidiario per le scuole (meno) elementari, ed. Gianfranco Salvatore (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2000), 229–38. 3 mangling occurs, as the folk is tightened by itchy arrangements and the music cracks. This is well suited to the siliceous liquids of his ‘cousin’, to his high-low frequency sizzles, his sobbing drones, sinusoidal oscillations. They penetrate the lopsided bodies of the songs from behind and emerge from various orifices with the colour of fatuous fires”. We are in the full pre-social media era, the apogee of websites, blogs, forums. Nobody, however, is talking about this record. How is that possible? Capossela is by now a big local star. So, when I pass in front of the only record store in my hometown, I go in and ask: is this Pierino l’eritematoso (‘Peter the erythematous’; this was the title) available, or can it be ordered? Does it exist? No, this beautiful record does not exist. It was a perfect object of desire. Not too different, in the end, from many of those other records I used to read about in music magazines which, if not imaginary, remained imagined only, for years; until I somehow managed to get them (by ordering very expensive import CDs or relying on friends who were early pioneers of eMule). Imaginary records but real reviews When someone writes about music writing there is this unwritten rule that says that either at the beginning or at the end (or somewhere in between, as in this case) the famous aphorism “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture” has to be evoked. The phrase is generally used to ridicule the pretensions of music criticism: its mission, translating music into words, is complex, paradoxical, basically meaningless.3 However, we know that a given cultural practice does not exist without the discoursive practice that enhances and actually constructs it as such in the first place: with the aesthetologist Dino Formaggio we can say not only that in the 20th century “art is everything that Mankind calls art” (let us think of Duchamp), but that, basically, it has always been so, only in a more disguised, negotiated way. Criticism is not an accessory to music, but rather what makes music music. Since the end of the Baroque period, music has gradually freed itself from the social role to which it could be reduced (liturgical music, court music, theatre music, dance music), giving room to a defunctionalised music, whose purpose was simply to be listened to, and which needed specific discourses that would explain its meaning and purpose. This new way of experiencing music was born at about the same time that both the aesthetics of music and bourgeois newspapers were born: thus, music criticism was born. The more its task seems difficult, the more crucial it is: the more music seems to be abstract and ineffable – the more it seems to have no sense – the more it is necessary to interpret it, in order to understand it. Music criticism, in short, is not necessarily a lesser evil, but certainly a necessary one. In his Sociology of Music, Theodor Adorno argued that 3 The phrase has been attributed to anyone who has ever walked the stage; it was written down for the first time in an interview with Elvis Costello (Musician 60, Oct.